Bash function to find newest file matching pattern

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The ls command has a parameter -t to sort by time. You can then grab the first (newest) with head -1.

ls -t b2* | head -1

But beware: Why you shouldn’t parse the output of ls

My personal opinion: parsing ls is only dangerous when the filenames can contain funny characters like spaces or newlines. If you can guarantee that the filenames will not contain funny characters then parsing ls is quite safe.

If you are developing a script which is meant to be run by many people on many systems in many different situations then I very much do recommend to not parse ls.

Here is how to do it “right”: How can I find the latest (newest, earliest, oldest) file in a directory?

unset -v latest
for file in "$dir"/*; do
  [[ $file -nt $latest ]] && latest=$file
done

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